In the east, the Cup does not overflow

From the window of my hotel room on the edges of Dresden's old town, the Altstadt, I can see the floodlights of the local football stadium, home to Dynamo Dresden. The club was once one of the powerhouses of the communist GDR, a regular in European competitions, but is now struggling in the German third division and watched by very few spectators. For this is no longer a football city, in any recognisable sense, which may partly explain why Dresden was not chosen to host a single World Cup game, even though the stated intention of the organising committee, at least when it was bidding for the World Cup, was to incorporate the east so that it became a tournament for the whole country.

There is not even a Fan Fest in Dresden, where supporters can gather en masse to watch the games on big screens, though there is one in nearly every other German city, the most popular being in Berlin, next to the Brandenburg Gate. For Germany's match against Ecuador last Tuesday there were as many as 500,000 people in central Munich watching the game on screens that are in place all along what is now known locally as the 'fan mile'.

'Dresden is very much a city of museums, churches, parks and music, a cultural city,' says my charming and elderly tour guide, Hannelore Klepzig, who came to live here in 1955 when it was still a bomb-blackened city of ruins. Now, the old centre is a wonder of ambitious and diligent reconstruction, as many of the baroque structures destroyed in the Allied bombing raid of February 1945 rise again.

On Friday night as I watched France play Togo in a bar a short walk from the rebuilt Frauenkirche (the Church of our Lady) the mood, compared with that in the other German cities I'd visited over recent weeks, was curiously muted, as if this city is of the World Cup but distinctly apart from it.

Like most of what was once the former GDR, it is fair to say that Dresden, the capital of Saxony, has been shut out from the official World Cup party. If you exclude Berlin, whose Olympiastadion is in the old western part of the city, only five of 64 World Cup games are scheduled to be played in the east, all in Leipzig. Only one team, Ukraine, has its base in the east, in Rostock. And now following last night's match between Argentina and Mexico in Leipzig, the World Cup is leaving the east altogether. There will be no more games here.

Should more have been done to include this part of Germany in what is after all an exercise in national rebranding?

To which the answer may be simply that the will did not exist to bring the World Cup carnival to Dresden, both locally and nationally. At France 1998, Montpellier, in the south, was included as a World Cup venue, despite its club then being in the third division. Temporary seats were added to bolster stadium capacity from 18,000 to 34,000, only to be removed after the tournament - by which time, Montpellier had a new TGV station and was internationally well known. In South Korea, in 2002, a stadium was built on Seogwipo, an island without a football team. The intention was to promote the island as a tourist destination, and so, naturally, Brazil were sent to play there. Who else? So where there is a will, as Ray Winstone reminds us in the gangster movie Sexy Beast, there is a way ...

'I don't think the east has been deliberately shut out from the World Cup,' says Jirka Grahl, an east German journalist who writes for Neues Deutschland, based in Berlin. 'When we were bidding for the Cup, the organisers made much of the fact that this was a bid from a united Germany, that bringing the tournament here would bring huge economic benefits to the east. This is why they wanted to include Leipzig, and spent a lot of money building the new Zentralstadion there. Should they have brought more football to the east? I don't know. We are used to the east being marginalised. It's the way it is here."

Neues Deutschland was once the Pravda of the old GDR, with a circulation of more than a million. Today, still leftish, it sells only about 70,000 copies a day. Its diminished fortunes, like those of the old East German football clubs, is representative of the losses as well as the gains of reunification and there remains a lingering sense in the east of the past having a more powerful presence than the present itself.

'Nostalgia or what we call "Ostalgie" is a very powerful force in the eastern states,' says Paul Nolte, professor of contemporary history at the Free University in Berlin. 'What are people nostalgic for? They're nostalgic for the lost certainties of the old era. There's a feeling that things were better and more ordered in those days. This manifests itself in a fondness for old East German products and brand names.'

For anyone interested in sport in the Seventies and Eighties among the most resonant 'brands' of the former GDR were its football clubs, Dynamo Dresden, Lokomotive Leipzig, Magdeburg, Dynamo Berlin. In European club competitions they were mysterious and often dangerous opponents from behind the Iron Curtain. In 1987, Leipzig reached the final of the European Cup Winners Cup, losing 1-0 to Ajax.

For a young boy growing up in the north-east London suburbs in a family for which the war and its long afterlife were a constant of conversation (my parents were both evacuees) there seemed something strange and romantic about these clubs from Dresden and Leipzig, once the architectural glory of the old prewar Germany but, destroyed by the Allied air raids, now so much part of the monolithic and oppressively grey Soviet world. Lost cities.

The Stasi-funded Dynamo Dresden won the East German championship five times in eight years during the Seventies as well as the league and cup double in 1990, the final season of its kind there ever was to be in East Germany. Soon afterwards the eastern and western leagues merged, the best players from the east - Thomas Doll, Matthias Sammer, Ulf Kirsten - joined Bundesliga clubs, and the eastern clubs began their long decline. Indeed, in 2004 Lokomotive Leipzig were declared bankrupt. East German club football, like full employment, was one of the casualties of reunification.

In the run-up to the World Cup there was significant investment in infrastructure throughout Germany, but especially in the cities in which games were being played, with new train stations opening, such as the magnificent central station in Berlin. Dresden seems to have missed out; its main station resembles nothing so much as a colossal building site. The inter-city train I took from Berlin to Dresden was also the shabbiest on which I have travelled during my time in Germany. There was not even any running water in the buffet carriage and no glasses from which to drink beer or water. Still, it was on time.

One suspects that the east remains something of an embarrassment to the rest of Germany. It is too poor. The social problems are too deep, with unemployment as high as 20 per cent. Racism and suspicion of the outsider are entrenched, especially in smaller towns.

Nolte says that parts of the east, notably Hoyerswerda in eastern Saxony and some of the Baltic towns, have indeed become, as he puts it, 'no go zones' for non-whites. 'We have a problem with young disadvantaged young men. In eastern Germany it's the women who are more mobile, who are more prepared to move to other parts of the country, such as affluent Bavaria, to live and work. The men tend to stay behind and, on the whole, their resentment grows."

Yesterday morning, as I had breakfast on the terrace of a cafe overlooking the Elbe, I saw something new in Dresden: a group of young men, in German football shirts, chanting loudly and waving flags. Of course, Germany were playing Sweden in the first of the knock-out games that afternoon in Berlin.

'Are you going to the game?' I said.

'No. To Leipzig - to the Fan Fest.'

'Why not stay here?"

'In Dresden!'

They began to laugh and then moved on, their chants reverberating through the tourist-cluttered streets of the Altstadt for a long time afterwards.